To promote these actions, the Digital Woman Program has been created, which its Coordinator Ivonne Plascencia will tell us about.
Interview with Ivonne Plascencia, Digital Woman Coordinator
My story with Junior Achievement begins when I was a participant in one of their educational programs. When I was a student I came across this organization, which offers a wide variety of educational programs on different topics, such as financial education, entrepreneurship and employability; all free for young people.
These programs were very significant in my professional development and I became so involved with the organization that I ended up volunteering in the activities. When I finish my professional training as a psychologist, I am hired to also coordinate educational programs.
From there I have been growing professionally. I started coordinating local programs, then slightly larger programs and now came this great opportunity for Digital Woman , an initiative that I am leading in Mexico, which seeks to benefit more women, as at some point these programs benefited me.
Junior Achievement is a global organization, we are in more than 123 countries and we have more than 100 years of history . In Mexico, the following year we celebrated 50 years of existence.
Our main focus is to bring these financial education, entrepreneurship and employability programs to young people and adults, from programs for very young primary school children to 80-year-old women who still want to start a business.
Junior Achievement is really an organization very committed to Telegram Number Data this movement; with this change to impact youth. We have been in the top 10 NGOs with the greatest impact worldwide for more than four years and in 2023 we were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the second time.
Digital Woman is an initiative that was born from the needs that we have detected, which presents the current panorama of employability that the pandemic has left us, which has left us with an evolution in the world of work. It was a giant transformation.
The first problem we detected is that in Latin America, there are many unemployed women and 80% of the women who have a job are informal jobs, they do not have some benefits and it is not a fixed income.
The second problem is that, today, there are many vacancies in the digital world, but there are no trained people or they do not have the profile to fill them. The third and big problem is migration. Talent is leaving our Latin countries in search of better opportunities.
These are problems that we want to eradicate, because Digital Woman is an initiative aimed at women between 17 and 30 years old, who have at least completed their high school diploma. This is because after the educational intervention, they have the possibility of being employed with some of our vacancies, some of the opportunities that we are going to share with them.
There are five months of training, 100% online, there are platforms to which they connect and they can watch the sessions at any time they want. They also have to enter some synchronous sessions for this accompaniment, but everything is from the comfort of your home. In addition, you have the opportunity to learn about cybersecurity, web development and cloud computing, with the possibility of getting certified thanks to our allies, such as IBM, Cisco and Amazon Web Services. These are international certifications that will give you one more tool to get more and better job opportunities, at no cost.
We have our website, jamujerdigital.org, where you must first register with your personal data. Subsequently, if we see that your profile is appropriate, you will receive a second sociodemographic data questionnaire. Finally, if this questionnaire is also appropriate, we will call you for an interview, where we want to know your schedule availability and whether you are willing to make this investment of time. The program has no cost, so we expect the commitment of the people who receive this benefit. After the interview, we select you and assign you a scholarship to study Digital Woman completely free of charge.
The only essential requirements to enter this program are that they are Mexican, they can be in any state of the Mexican Republic; that they have a computer to connect to and that they have an internet connection . The group to which we give the highest priority are women who do not have the opportunity to study at university or higher education and who do not have a job.
After their five months of educational intervention, there are five more months of support to link them to job opportunities, and thanks to our sponsors, we will have some offers for them in which they can apply and have the opportunity to enter the digital market.
We are in the middle of the campaign, August is the month of registration and September we are going to do the interviews, so we are already very close to the closing of the second court and Digital Woman begins in October.
As an educational institution, we try to innovate and be at the forefront of educational needs. One that we strongly identified was this need to link more women to the digital economy. The support of the years of work has allowed us to connect with great allies, such as the Inter-American Development Bank , which is our main donor, which helps us carry out this program in six countries.
Locally, we have other alliances that allow us to carry out the program, such as Neoris, one of our donors, who also supported us with an investment to benefit some women and who is supporting us with dissemination channels and opportunities to communicate the program. They have even donated some equipment to us to benefit some women so they can take the program.
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We evaluate, in addition to sociodemographic data, that they do not have this option of higher education and that they do not currently have a job. We evaluate your commitment, because this is a long-term investment of time and requires 10 to 12 hours per week on the platform. They do not need to be in front of the camera always, but they do need to do tasks of exploring the platforms, resolving the content and so on.
I tell you that it is not necessary that you have any prior knowledge in technology, since we are starting from scratch. This is a program to catapult your talent into a digital career and we start at the base, with this certification in beginner roles that can later advance to higher roles.
It should be noted that the program accepts women who are working, but we give priority to those who do not have a contract or a fixed monthly income, those who do not have the security of a job.
In the courses we are going to work, not only on the technical content, but also on life skills, for example, how to write a resume, how to present yourself at an interview, how to be a leader, how to know how to work as a team. That is, we work on all soft skills, which although it is not in person, there are sessions a week where you connect with a facilitator who helps you with these life skills.
There is also an instructor to help you with your technical questions. There is a whole team of professionals that we will be connecting with weekly for this follow-up so that you do not feel that you are alone in the learning process. This is half asynchronous, half synchronous.